Loaded Question

I celebrated Rosh-Hashanah last night, feasted on the brisque, caramlelized carrots, wine and apples dipped in honey at my friend Peter’s house. Today I helped build a table for my boat-building class, then suffered through the editor’s clutches during a re-write of my article on Berhanu Nega. I went to work at 5:30 p.m., left at 7. Tonight I hung out with some pals across the street, smoking cigarettes, talking about “Saw IV” and “3:10 to Yuma.” Iraq, to most of them, was not the topic of the week.

Tomorrow I embark on an adventure that I’m sad to say I won’t be sharing with a companion. It’s a private call to duty, in a sense–I’m heading up to Washington, D.C., on a bus chartered by the activist organization ANSWER, to partake in a demonstration in front of the White House.

To so many of us students, if anything, this has become a tiring war. I see it on our faces–outrage, ground to cynicism, and finally congealed as fatigue. The subject lacks interest, or the student is apathetic. One classmate wrapped hate in apathy: “Screw the other countries, I’m not there.”

I have a feeling that a lot of us don’t know what to believe in, or what strategy to choose, anymore. Whatever we feel, we usually clam it up inside, often forcing it back to the dark corners our mind’s eyes avoid.

A lot of us, myself included, live in this grip of war. Just ask the SDS mailing list about how war affects them. I talked with James about it today at GMP–the underwhelming news coverage of this week’s “surge” assessment brought us together like magnets, even if we just concluded that we were tired of Bush’s lies.

Maybe we just don’t talk about the war enough. Or maybe, sometimes, talking about it hurts.